Agent-based active information resource and its applications

A scheme of active information resource (AIR) provides a novel approach to actively support using the distributed information resources over the networked environment. With the AIR, passive information resources are extended into autonomous and active entities. The extended information resources can actively perform tasks to support use of them, so that the burden for users can be reduced. Moreover, multiple extended information resources can organize in a decentralized way to autonomously cooperate with each other, and this will enable a more flexible support for using them in the distributed environment. An agent-oriented design model for AIR is developed, and the agent-based AIR is applied and verified in two tasks of support for using distributed academic information resources and managing the operations of network system. The results of experiments on two prototype systems verified that the proposed approach has better performance than conventional approaches do.